Last night was almost like a trip back in time. My wife and I met up with lots of old friends, indivuduals we hadn't seen in two or more decades, plus some new friends as well. After a great dinner at Silver Spring Mining Company, we adjuourned to a nearby American Legion for a night on the town. There was a five-piece band playing on stage, which consisted of a drummer, sax player, keyboard player, and two vocalists (male and female).

One of the OMB performers who was in our group said "You can really hear the difference when you have a live drummer! This group really rocks."

Well, I thought about this for a while and came to the following conclusions:

Yep, the drummer was great, his timing was outstanding and he really knew his stuff. However, the drums completely drowned out the keyboard and essentially overpowered everything else. Yep, they were really up front and loud.

The keyboard player, who is an excellent OMB performer as well, was essentially playing a piano, strings, guitar, and some left hand bass. If anything, he was backing up the drummer with complementary sounds.

The sax player was outstanding as well, and fortunately, there was a mic dedicated to the sax. Therefore, when he was playing solo runs, the drummer kept his parts at a low level so the sax was out in front. The same held true when the singers were performing--the drums were somewhat dubdued.

While the group put on a good show, the smoke-filled dancefloor was never packed to capacity. Sure, there were a few times when it seemed to fill up, but it was rare to see more than one to three couples on the dancefloor.

I sincerely believe that most OMB performers that deal with dance crowds would have packed the dancefloor to capacity. Additionally, the overall sound quality would have been much better balanced.

Finally, most Americal Legions pay about $150 to $200 for a 4-hour gig, which was split between 5 performers who had to endure a dense fog of cigarette smoke and a few drunks. At the end of the night we all headed home, tired, smelling like cigarette smoke and ready for a hot shower before hitting the sack. Kinda' reminds me of the way things were more than 40 years ago when I was a you kid and just getting into the entertainment biz--same pay scale, same drunks and same smoke-filled bar-rooms. Some things never seem to change!

Cheers,

Gary

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Travlin' Easy